Ken Domon

Ken Domon (土門 拳) was a celebrated Japanese photographer known for his work as a photojournalist and as a photographer of Buddhist temples and statuary. Domon, who began his career in the 1930s contributing photo reportages to magazines that supported the increasingly militaristic Japanese state and its imperial policies, later criticized propaganda photography. His subsequent termination from the government agency he worked for spurred his career as a freelance photographer. As photojournalists grappled with how to depict the new social reality of the post-WWII period, Domon forged the realistic photography movement (Riarizumu Shashin Undō). He embraced the idea of snapshot photography (sunappu), in which images could be captured with "absolute unstagedness". Domon documented the aftermath of the war, focusing on society and the lives of ordinary people. He received national acclaim for his portraits of children in exploitative labor conditions and Hiroshima bomb survivors (hibakusha). Domon was forced to abandon sunappu photography after he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1958. His major project until the end of his career was photographing temples across Japan, a much-beloved subject that he had first begun to document in 1940. These images constituted the monumental series Pilgrimage to Ancient Temples (Kojijunrei), published in five volumes from 1963 to 1975.